Editorial: Terrorists on the run?

Saturday

May 31, 2008 at 12:01 AMMay 31, 2008 at 7:11 AM

The politics of fear, as practiced by the Bush administration and its conservative supporters, stresses simple narratives: Iran is run by a madman, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad; Muslims everywhere are heeding the call of the terrorists and only the strongest U.S. response can stop them. The reality is more complicated and - this week at least - less scary.

The politics of fear, as practiced by the Bush administration and its conservative supporters, stresses simple narratives: Iran is run by a madman, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad; Muslims everywhere are heeding the call of the terrorists and only the strongest U.S. response can stop them. The reality is more complicated and - this week at least - less scary.

Two headlines Thursday remind us that politics is fluid, even in the Muslim world.

In Lebanon, Prime Minister Fuad Saniora won a new term with the backing of a pro-U.S. coalition, over the objections of Hezbollah, a terrorist group that had been growing more powerful in that fractious country.

In Iran, a moderate rival to Ahmadinejad was elected speaker of the parliament by an overwhelming margin. The vote was seen as an indication that Ahmadinejad, already unpopular with the people over his mishandling of the economy, has lost the support of Iran's powerful clerics.

Good news is also found in a study of terrorism from Canada's Simon Fraser University. According to U.S. government figures, the number of civilian victims of terrorism is up sharply in recent years, but those include civilians killed in Iraq, who are victims of war, not terrorism. The Fraser study factors those victims out - and finds global terrorism has declined more than 40 percent since 2001.

Better yet, the Fraser study found that casualties are down because there has been a dramatic drop in support for extremist groups in the Muslim world. That progress came in spite of American policies, not because of them.

"These are largely self-inflicted wounds," Newsweek columnist Fareed Zakaria writes. "The more people are exposed to the jihadists' tactics and world view, the less they support them."

Zakaria cites an ABC/BBC poll that found support for militants in Afghanistan to be just 1 percent. Support for Osama bin Laden in Pakistan fell from 70 percent in August 2007 to just 4 percent last January. Muslims, it turns out, don't like random killings any more than anyone else, even when wrapped in religious trappings.

These findings should remind us that American policies must look beyond the individual leaders we find disagreeable, to the aspirations of their people. And we must focus much less on what we fear, much more on what we can build, here and around the world.